Dr Julia Martins, King’s College London
In the sixteenth century, Venetian presses were flooding the European market with vernacular recipe books. Many of these collections included entries for medicines to be prepared and used in a domestic environment. However, several of the ingredients used in these compositions could not be easily found beyond the Italian peninsula, such as specific wines, spices, or herbs. So, when these recipe books started to be translated and sold to new markets, translators and publishers had to be creative, with many of them replacing the problematic ingredients with alternatives. This paper analyses the cultural translation of materia medica in vernacular texts.
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Dr Julia Martins (she/her) just finished her PhD at King’s College London. Her thesis was about the translation of “secrets of women” from Italian into French and English in the 16th and 17th centuries, and how the circulation of knowledge about sex and reproduction shaped the way the body was understood. Her general research interests are gender history, the history of medicine, and feminism. Julia also has a free blog/newsletter called Secrets of Women about gender history and medicine. You can check it out here: juliamartins.co.uk